Do you experience problems after running SM for a long time?

[Lemon Juice]

Specifically I am talking about out of memory problems. After I'm running and using SeaMonkey for many hours sometimes it starts misbehaving in various ways: sites stop responding to clicks, new windows open completely blank (with no controls), black areas appearing in browser windows, elements jumping around the screen to weird locations, etc. After this happens for a while SM usually crashes. I experience this occasionally every few days and can't find the reason for this.

Once I had the error console open while this was happening and I saw it reporting "Out of memory" errors. Indeed, the task manager showed around 1GB of memory usage by seamonkey.exe. Usually, when it goes up to this amount it means the start of problems. And obviously, the memory is not freed after closing browser windows or tabs.

I thought this might be caused by an extension but trying to test this is a task too big for my patience as I would have to use bare SM for weeks to observe any pattern and then more weeks by turning on each extension one by one... What I know is that Flash is not the culprit nor Firebug, nor Web Developer, nor Form History Control, nor Html Validator - these are the 'heaviest' extensions I use.

Recently, I may have discovered a possible trace - when memory problems started happening I closed Mail and after about half a minute memory usage dropped from 1GB to about 500MB and SM started working well again. I have yet to test it more but could Mail be causing memory problems in SM? I usually have Mail open on one or two IMAP accounts and it sits in the background minimized to the window tray (using MinimizeToTray revived extension).

I'm wondering if it is only me experiencing these problems or do they happen to other people as well. I am on Win 7 32-bit with 3GB of RAM. If I remember well this started happening somewhere around SM 2.26 since I can't remember having such issues in earlier versions. Also, there are no specific web sites where these problems occur since it's usually a collection of various windows and tabs open and obviously, I can't reproduce the problem later on on these same sites.

[Frank Lion]

Try ~ enter about:config in the addressbar and enter layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled into the searchbar at the top of the page. Right click that entry and toggle to false. Restart Firefox. You're done.

Also make sure that Hardware Acceleration is off, under Edit>Prefs>Appearance>Content.

Only a possible fix, but very easy and quick to try.

[Lemon Juice]

Try ~ enter about:config in the addressbar and enter layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled into the searchbar at the top of the page. Right click that entry and toggle to false. Restart Firefox. You're done.

Also make sure that Hardware Acceleration is off, under Edit>Prefs>Appearance>Content.

Only a possible fix, but very easy and quick to try.

I'll try that but it is not quick to try at all. Every tweak like this may take me a few days of heavy browsing to notice any change. Moreover, using SM with no HA is not a nice experience on some sites.

[barbaz]

No idea if this is gonna help you or not, but if Frank Lion's suggestion doesn't help you, can you install about:addons-memory and see if this excessive memory use is shown as associated with some specific addon (or just as part of the browser, or not shown there at all)?

[Lemon Juice]

I've already tried about:addons-memory but it didn't show excessive memory usage by any addon. I'm trying out turning off the graphics related stuff as suggested by Frank but I doubt if it's going to help because the problems seem unrelated to graphics - however, anything is possible in such a complex system.

I also tried freeing memory using about:memory controls but those had very short-lived effect. The only thing that really freed memory was closing Mail.

[therube]

I've experience OOM issues from, go figure, OOM issues .
And yes when you get near, thinks start to get funky.
I don't use Mail & run cZ "stand-alone" (with FF 3.0 as the backend).
I keep a lot of windows/tabs open & restart sessions that way, so I"m always using a lot of memory from the get go.
There have been better times & worse times.
Of late, things have been much better behaved & if I were to crash due to an OOM issue, it would be unexpected for me.
(Cause aside, last crash was 8-23-14 & the one prior was 7-21-14.)
Mozilla certainly does change between versions, & settings (Prefs) that existed & worked fine from day one all of a sudden can cause issues with the next release.
At some point in the not too distant past, things had gotten so bad for me, regularly pushing memory limits & associated crashes, I decided it was time to start my Profile(s) afresh (in particular prefs.js, but not sessionstore.json), then putting back my extensions, & not fiddling with tweaks that had worked for ages in the past.
I also dumped Adblock Plus as, for me, it seemed to play a role in #1, higher memory usage from the onset & #2, it seemed I would be less like to return memory (from closed windows) when ABP was in use.
I've not used SeaMonkey 2.30 much of yet but it seems to be working OK (memory wise).
I've never had about:memory (minimize memory usage) do anything useful & would not expect it to?
A couple of times I've used Process Hacker to "Miscellaneous | Reduce Working Set" & it has, even substantially, but I haven't messed with it & its results to say whether I've actually "accomplished" or helped anything by doing so?
I typically have Process Hacker open, & I try to keep an eye on (SeaMonkey) memory usage. Knowing from where I've started, I look for consistency or if I know I'm running something memory intensive, I'll try to watch for "expected" increases & likewise "expected" decreases in usage after closing a window. And that is the way things have played out of late. Consistent & expected & I'm good with that.
In one Profile, where I'm more likely to be playing videos & such & likely to be running with higher memory numbers then in my "normal" Profile, I had just the other day turned off Hardware Acceleration, to see how/if that might affect things, but I haven't been back to it yet to see.


Why are you running 32-bit Win7?
Putting the x64 version in should allow a little more leeway before running into OOM issues.


OMTC is one of the new changes in SeaMonkey 2.30 & not have a lot of experience with 2.30 yet & not particularly noticing anything odd in 2.30, I'm leaving OMTC enabled & if I run into problems, at that point maybe I'll look into disabling it & see if it is a help or hindrance.


Hardware Acceleration I'd never know if it were enabled or not - from a "performance" perspective. Maybe if I was on a site where it greatly helped & I could test on & off, I could say, hey look at that, but as it is I wouldn't know one way or the other. Though I do know that in the past it did materially affect stability of the browser (including OOM related issues) but can say that of recent because I how things have been of late has been fine, so I've had no real reason to particularly want to experiment (except as noted above, which I'll get back to at some point).


> started happening somewhere around SM 2.26

Looks to have been around the same for me, & at some point around then would have been my "Profile cleanup" stage.
SeaMonkey Aurora Mem Usage Way High
Bug 966662 - Memory usage increase with Firefox 26 compared to earlier

[Lemon Juice]

Thanks for your detailed response, you've been through quite an ordeal with memory issues! Although I appreciate your response it is not encouraging since any solutions come down to time-consuming diagnostics and trial and error experiments. There are so many variables and often lack of consistency that it's hard to find the culprit. I've been watching SM for a few months now and my findings regarding memory issues are scarce. Most often it's because they occur very infrequently and don't seem to follow any pattern so I can't reproduce them. The only thing I discovered was that closing Mail freed memory successfully and it happened twice with 100% success rate.

Why are you running 32-bit Win7?
Putting the x64 version in should allow a little more leeway before running into OOM issues.

I have the current system for almost two years and I didn't really have the need for a 64-bit OS since 32-bit did the job for me and was too lazy to upgrade RAM so I thought 32-bit would run better on 3 GB of RAM.

However, one thing that really puzzles me is why doesn't SM use all of my available RAM? It seems that 1 GB is the absolute maximum it can stand even if I don't run many other applications and I have quite a lot more ram available. Sometimes it chokes even at 700-800 MB. I know this may not be a permanent solution for memory problems but why won't SM ever use more RAM up to 2 GB or even more? Certainly, a 32-bit OS can allocate more than 1 GB for a single application.

OMTC is one of the new changes in SeaMonkey 2.30

If it is so recent then Frank's suggestion to disable it may not do much since I haven't noticed any negative or positive changes in 2.30 regarding memory issues.

Hardware Acceleration I'd never know if it were enabled or not - from a "performance" perspective. Maybe if I was on a site where it greatly helped & I could test on & off, I could say, hey look at that, but as it is I wouldn't know one way or the other.

I can notice the difference on some sites quite clearly - for example, Google Maps, HTML video players - they suffer the most from lack of HA. And a stupid thing like a few gif smileys next to the new post form on this site can cause my CPU to go up to around 30% due to a long standing bug - HA mostly alleviates the gif CPU-draining problem.

[therube]

> any solutions come down to time-consuming diagnostics and trial and error experiments

Yep, when you run into problems, that's what you've got to do.

> There are so many variables and often lack of consistency that it's hard to find the culprit

True.

>I've been watching __ for a few months now and my findings regarding ___ issues

Nothing really different. Software has issues. FF has issues, SeaMonkey has issues.
May be the same, different, or related. That's the way it goes.

> why doesn't SM use all of my available RAM? It seems that 1 GB is the absolute maximum
> it can stand

That does seem odd, a bit low.
But other hardware & software may also come into play. M/B chipset & drivers & onboard or dedicated video memory & ...

I'm now on XP, 2 GB physical RAM, (with SeaMonkey) using 1.6 GB of RAM (Private bytes, 1.2 GB Working set) plus all the other applications I have open.

Experience tells me I'm good up to just about 2 GB.
But as things stand at present, I'm highly unlikely to get near that, so no real concerns at present.

> And a stupid thing like a few gif smileys

Yep odd crap like that can have a pronounced effect on a browser.

[Lemon Juice]

> why doesn't SM use all of my available RAM? It seems that 1 GB is the absolute maximum
> it can stand

That does seem odd, a bit low.
But other hardware & software may also come into play. M/B chipset & drivers & onboard or dedicated video memory & ...

I'm now on XP, 2 GB physical RAM, (with SeaMonkey) using 1.6 GB of RAM (Private bytes, 1.2 GB Working set) plus all the other applications I have open.

Experience tells me I'm good up to just about 2 GB.

So maybe there's something weird on my end or maybe what I am suspecting (below)... Usually, applications will use all available physical memory and then will start to take up virtual memory and slowness due to pagefile swapping begins but despite that the application shouldn't crash.

Today I had an interesting case of out of memory problems (one resulted in a crash) - I was browsing the google image search engine and noticed SM eating up memory like crazy - going from about 300MB to 1100MB in a few seconds and the standard symptoms of the browser acting up appeared (empty windows, graphics not refreshing, etc.). The strange thing was that I had just restarted SM so my browsing session was very short and only 4 or 5 tabs open. This is what about:addons-memory showed me:

> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... memory.png

All these values of a few hundred kilobytes or less than 2 megabytes seemed pretty tiny to me. But nevertheless, Console² seemed to take up most memory of all my extensions. So I closed the console and within a few seconds memory usage dropped from 1100MB to 270MB. So maybe I got the culprit? I'll be watching this closer now to see if it's really Console² that eats all the memory and causes crashes at around 1GB mark. Maybe Phillip Chee would be able to say more as the author? This looked like a small and lightweight extension to me and that's why I didn't even suspect it.

BTW, are there any alternatives to Console²? I need something for monitoring chrome errors.

[Lemon Juice]

I can confirm this was Console² causing the memory problems! This does not happen on all sites but I have found a good example where this can be reproduced:

http://ladnydom.pl/budowa/1,106565,5878 ... _lata.html

When Console² is open and I load that page memory consumption will jump from 200 MB to around 1100 MB in a few seconds. When the console is closed it stays fine within 200-something range. When I disable Console² and load the page with the standard console open then the memory will jump up to around 400 MB but very soon will drop back down to 200-something. Also, the page loads much slower when Console² is open.

A few observations:

• pressing the clear button in Console² frees the memory for the moment, even if no errors are reported, but on page reload it skyrockets again
• when I turn off option "Report CSS Errors" then problem is apparently gone - on this page there seem to be some crazy amount of css messages reported and even if the console is set not to show them they must be collected in the background and hence the problems
• Firefox acts the same

[therube]

Console² has had a long standing bug, don't recall anymore what in particular it was, but I think it dealt with (was it ?) CSS filtering that caused a prolonged hang (pretty sure it eventually subsided?) so while I liked it & while it was better then SeaMonkey's Error Console, I had long since stopped using it.

[Lemon Juice]

Yes, this bug seems to be affecting CSS reporting - at least in my limited tests so far. Fortunately, CSS error reporting can be turned off and then the memory problems are gone (probably) - I'll be watching it more closely now. I don't really need CSS error reporting much so this is an acceptable workaround for me. I used to browse the internet often with the console somewhere in the background because I never bothered to close it - I never suspected it can actually be the biggest resource hog in my SM

[patrickjdempsey]

Both Console2 and Bugzilla should really be run only in a separate development profile apart from your normal browsing profile.

Because I was having issues with Console2 and I only used it for inspecting Chrome content, I created this little extension that adds a button to the normal Console and does a filter for "chrome://".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamon ... me-filter/

[therube]

I think you meant: s/firebug/Bugzilla/

[patrickjdempsey]

Yeah, Firebug. It's been a long week!